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The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War

Beschreibung

From the author the classic The Wizards of Armageddonand Pulitzer Prize finalist comes the definitive history of American policy on nuclear war—and Presidents’ actions in nuclear crises—from Truman to Trump.

Fred Kaplan, hailed by TheNew York Times as “a rare combination of defense intellectual and pugnacious reporter,” takes us into the White House Situation Room, the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s “Tank” in the Pentagon, and the vast chambers of Strategic Command to bring us the untold stories—based on exclusive interviews and previously classified documents—of how America’s presidents and generals have thought about, threatened, broached, and just barely avoided nuclear war from the dawn of the atomic age until today.

Kaplan’s historical research and deep reporting will stand as the permanent record of politics. Discussing theories that have dominated nightmare scenarios from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Kaplan presents the unthinkable in terms of mass destruction and demonstrates how the nuclear war reality will not go away, regardless of the dire consequences.

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The Bomb - Fred Kaplan

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In memory of R.C. Davis and V. Lanphier

And, as always, for Brooke

INTRODUCTION

For thirty years after the Cold War ended, almost no one thought, much less worried, about nuclear war. Now almost everyone is fearful. But the fear takes the form of a vaguely paralyzed anxiety. Because of the long reprieve from the bomb’s shadow, few people know how to grasp its dimensions; they’ve forgotten, if they ever knew.

The holiday from history ended on August 8, 2017, when President Donald Trump, barely six months in office, told reporters at his golf resort in Bedminster, New Jersey, that if the North Koreans kept threatening the United States with harsh rhetoric and missile tests,

they will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.

Even to those who didn’t remember President Harry Truman’s similar description, seventy-two years earlier, of the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima (

a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth), it was clear that, in language more bellicose than any president’s since the end of World War II, Trump was talking about launching nuclear weapons at North Korea—not if its leader, Kim Jong-un, first attacked the United States, but merely if he developed the ability to do so.

Then, six months later, Trump signed and released his administration’s Nuclear Posture Review, a seventy-four-page document that called for building new types of nuclear weapons and integrating them with the military’s conventional war plans—in short, for treating nuclear weapons as normal. The red lights flashed, the alarm bells rang furiously.

Yet here is what few recognized: none of these notions were new. The president himself seemed a departure from the norm, his character—erratic, eruptive, thin-skinned, willfully uninformed—a combustive mix for a world leader with his finger on the button. But the button and everything around it were the same. In those decades when most of us chose to forget about the bomb—as global tensions calmed and fallout shelters crumbled and we turned our gaze to other problems and pleasures—the nuclear war machine continued to rumble forth in the beyond-Top-Secret chambers of the Pentagon, the Strategic Command headquarters in Omaha, the weapons labs in various parts of the country, and the think tanks whose denizens never stopped thinking about the unthinkable.

They all kept at their singular tasks, wrestling with the dilemmas posed by the bomb’s existence: how to deter nuclear war; how to fight a nuclear war, if it cannot be deterred; how to win it, if such a thing is possible. This is the nature of the nuclear era, and the era never drifted into suspension, even if our attention did. Trump snapped us out of our slumber: reminded those who were old enough to know, and informed those who weren’t, that the bomb is still here.

In public, over the years, officers and officials have described America’s nuclear policy as second-strike deterrence: if an enemy strikes us with nuclear weapons, we will retaliate in kind; this retaliatory power is what deters the enemy from attacking us. In reality, though, American policy has always been to strike first preemptively, or in response to a conventional invasion of allied territory, or to a biological or large-scale cyber attack: in any case, not just as an answer to a nuclear attack. All of these options envision firing nuclear weapons at military targets for military ends; they envision the bomb as a weapon of war, writ large. This vision has been enshrined in the American military’s doctrines, drills, and exercises from the onset of the nuclear era through all its phases. Most presidents have been skeptical of this vision—morally, strategically, practically—but none of them have rejected it. Some have threatened to launch nuclear weapons first as a way of settling a crisis. The few who considered adopting a no first use policy, in the end, decided against it.

There are rationales for these doctrines, drills, and exercises and for the retention of the first-use option. They are driven by politics, personalities, and bureaucratic rivalries, but also by a logic, which, once its premises are accepted, hurls its adherents—and the rest of us—into a rabbit hole of increasingly bizarre scenarios that seem increasingly, if strangely, rational the deeper they’re probed.

Understanding the nuclear era—the era of our lifetime—means understanding the rabbit hole: who dug it and how we got stuck inside. It means tracing the maze of its tunnels, which is to say, the arc of its history: a story enmeshed in secrecy, some of it still secret, much of it now illuminated—by declassified documents and interviews with key actors—though never fully told.

How did we get to this second coming of nuclear panic? How did we wind up with thousands of nuclear weapons, far more than any war aims could justify? What propelled the nuclear arms race during the decades-long Cold War? And what happened to the weapons and their guardians after the Cold War ended? How and why did any of this persist?

CHAPTER 1

Killing a Nation

In the spring of 1945, General Henry Hap Arnold, commander of the U.S. Army Air Forces, asked his top bombardier, Major General Curtis LeMay, when the war would be over. Nazi Germany had recently surrendered to the Allies, but the Japanese kept fighting, despite the pummeling of their cities by LeMay’s firebombing raids.

LeMay took the question to his staff officers. They calculated how many Japanese cities hadn’t yet been hit, how many more bombs were needed to hit them, and how long it would take for the men of his XXI Bomber Command to deliver and drop them. LeMay came back with the answer.

The war will be over by the first of September, he told Arnold with his trademark gruff confidence. That, he explained, was when his men would run out of targets to hit—when every square mile of Japan would be incinerated.

This was LeMay’s philosophy of how to win modern wars: bomb everything.

In fact, the war ended a few weeks earlier, on August 6, when a B-29 Superfortress aircraft, nicknamed Enola Gay, dropped a new kind of weapon—an atomic bomb—on Hiroshima. The level of destruction was astonishing. LeMay’s air raids had been terrifying enough: his most intense attack, five months earlier, had amassed 334 B-29s to drop incendiary bombs over Tokyo, burning to a crisp nearly sixteen square miles of the city and killing 84,000 residents. A single A-bomb, dropped by a single airplane over Hiroshima, obliterated almost five square miles and killed 150,000 people. On August 9, another B-29, called Bockscar, dropped an atom bomb on Nagasaki. Six days later, the Japanese emperor surrendered. The war was over, but warfare had been transformed.

The generation of Army airmen who came of age in the 1930s, LeMay included, were enthralled by the theories of the Italian and American generals, Giulio Douhet and Billy Mitchell, visionaries who saw air power as the decisive force in wars of the future, transcending the brutal skirmishes on the ground, striking directly at the enemy’s industrial strength and civilian morale, without which its leaders could no longer wage war. The present war, the Second World War, the first war in which air power played a major role, hadn’t yet clinched the case, especially in the European theater, where the clash of armies still dominated. But at the end of the war, this new weapon, it was thought, might make the airmen’s dream come true.

In 1947, in recognition of its impact on the recent victory, the Army Air Forces were declared a separate service, coequal with the Army and the Navy. This was a significant move. As long as they were a unit within the Army, the air forces would support the Army’s policies and missions, mainly by providing air support to troops on the battlefield. Even LeMay’s bombing raids were initially intended to degrade Japan’s military machine and thus pave the way for the Army’s impending invasion of the mainland. But as a separate service, the U.S. Air Force, as it was now called, could set its own missions and strategies. (LeMay was already accustomed to this: toward the end of the war, when thick clouds over Japan prevented him from hitting specific targets, he started dropping firebombs on populated areas—because areas were all he could hit—on his own initiative.)

In 1948, LeMay was placed in charge of a unit within the Air Force known as SAC, the Strategic Air Command, which planned the missions for the planes that would drop atomic bombs in the next war. Under LeMay’s tight, aggressive leadership, SAC came to dominate not only the Air Force but the entire military establishment: its thinking, its culture, its war plans, its budgets.

At first, President Harry Truman resisted this juggernaut.

Soon after Hiroshima, as he realized the full extent of the new weapon’s devastation, Truman decided not to build any more A-bombs, in case the United Nations banned them. When it became clear that this wasn’t going to happen and that the Russians were getting aggressive in Berlin, he cranked up the program. But even then, he kept the bomb under civilian control. For several years, the Air Force had to go through the Atomic Energy Commission even to load the weapons onto their planes.

On July 21, 1948, at a meeting with David Lilienthal, the AEC commissioner, and a few of the top generals, Truman explained his reasoning:

I don’t think we ought to use this thing unless we absolutely have to. It is a terrible thing to order the use of something that—and here, Truman looked down at his desk reflexively—that this is so terribly destructive, destructive beyond anything we have ever had. He continued:

You have got to understand that this isn’t a military weapon. It is used to wipe out women and children and unarmed people, and not for military uses. So we have got to treat this thing differently from rifles and cannons and ordinary things like that.

Much of the history of the bomb over the subsequent seventy years, and doubtless beyond, is the story of the generals—and many civilian strategists, as well—trying to make it a military weapon after all.

At first, the Army and the Navy tried to halt history too.

In 1949, when the Defense Department cut the budget for ships in order to buy more bombers, the Navy’s top echelon of admirals staged an unprecedented revolt. Several of them condemned the A-bomb on moral grounds. At a congressional hearing, Rear Admiral Ralph Ofstie—who had served on the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, a postwar panel of officers and economists that downplayed the role of air power in the Allied victory—condemned Air Force–style city-bombing as

Other officers criticized the A-bomb as militarily ineffective. One unfortunate Navy commander named Eugene Tatom testified that you could stand at one end of Washington National Airport, set off an atom bomb on the other end, and walk away

without serious injury.

The admirals’ revolt soon collapsed from its own incoherence. The contradiction between Ofstie’s testimony and Tatom’s was risible: the A-bomb couldn’t be both barbaric and toothless. It became all too clear that the admirals’ main problem with the bomb was that the Air Force had it and the Navy did not. The admirals relented and then, after something less than a decent interval, embraced the bomb with a convert’s fervor.

Besides, the bomb was, by and large, popular. Tensions between the United States and its largest wartime ally, the Soviet Union, had been brewing since their joint victory. The war had ended with their troops facing one another across the border demarking the two new German states—a U.S.-occupied West Germany and a Soviet-controlled East Germany. Since then, the United States had demobilized much of its vast army; life on the home front was settling into normalcy. If the Cold War heated up to a shooting war, as seemed likely, better, many believed, to win it quickly by slamming the Communists with A-bombs than to send millions of American boys back to the grueling battlefields of Europe from which they’d only recently departed.

By 1952, a mere three years after the admirals’ revolt, all of the Navy’s new combat planes were designed to carry nuclear weapons. The Army and even the Marine Corps were equipping their battalions and brigades with short-range nuclear missiles and even nuclear artillery shells to help repel an invasion.

In that same year, the Los Alamos laboratory built and tested a hydrogen bomb. While the blast of an A-bomb was measured in kilotons (the equivalent of thousands of tons of TNT), the H-bomb released the power of megatons (millions of tons). Some of the scientists who’d helped build the atom bomb questioned whether this new weapon—at first called the Super—was more destructive than any war aim could justify. But by this time, the Cold War was in full force; if American scientists could build an H-bomb, Soviet scientists could someday do so too. Just months later, in fact, the Soviets did test a bomb that came close to matching the explosive power of the H-bomb. And so the project zoomed forth, and super-bombs were cranked out in vast quantity.

The American military wove the new weapons into its war plans with no hesitation. In March 1954, the Joint Chiefs of Staff—the top officers of all the branches of the armed forces—declared in a Top Secret document,

In a general war, regardless of the manner of initiation, atomic weapons will be used at the outset.

The term general war was defined as an armed conflict that pitted American and Soviet forces directly against one another. In other words, a war between the world’s two new superpowers would be, from the first salvos, a nuclear war. This would be the case regardless of the manner of initiation. Any armed Soviet incursion into territory deemed vital to U.S. interests—even a tentative crossing of the East-West German border—would spark an instant, all-out nuclear response.

This wasn’t exclusively the military’s position. The JCS document that set forth this policy was attached to a policy paper titled U.S. Objectives in the Event of General War with the Soviet Bloc, drafted by the National Security Council and signed by President Dwight Eisenhower.

Eisenhower was a retired Army general—a five-star general, the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe during World War II, and the Army chief of staff soon after. Yet, like most of the citizens who elected him president by an overwhelming margin in 1952, he had no hunger for another land war. His most popular campaign pledge had been to end the war in Korea, a bitter stalemate that had gone on since 1950, killing more than 35,000 American troops. He ended the war, so it seemed, by threatening to drop nuclear bombs on the Soviet Union—which, along with the new Communist government of China, had backed North Korea in its invasion of South Korea. An armistice was signed six months after he took office.I

It wasn’t that Eisenhower was itching to use nuclear weapons; he abhorred their destructive power and understood that a nuclear war would herald catastrophe. But for that reason, he thought that threatening to use them would deter the Kremlin and any other foe from aggression.

He came to this view in the weeks leading up to his inauguration. After winning the election, he traveled to Korea and visited the troops, then flew to Guam and Pearl Harbor, where he met his entourage of top advisers, who joined him on board the cruiser USS Helena, to steam back to the United States.

The group included his designated secretaries of state and defense, John Foster Dulles and Charles Wilson; his incoming treasury secretary and budget director; and Admiral Arthur Radford, commander of the Pacific Fleet, whom Eisenhower wanted to size up as a possible chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. (Radford passed the audition.)

In the relaxed setting of a boat ride in the Pacific, they talked about how to solve what Eisenhower called the

great equation—how to protect the nation without wrecking the economy. Eisenhower was a penny-pincher.

Throughout his presidency, in speeches, diary entries, and private conversations with aides, he worried that weakening the U.S. economy would weaken its defenses—and that a rising federal budget, even if much of it was spent on troops and weapons, would hurl the nation’s economy and thus its defenses into a tailspin.

So the solution that Eisenhower and his group devised—the essence of the great equation—was to rely a lot more on the nuclear bomb.

Almost immediately after taking office, Eisenhower directed his cabinet secretaries to flesh out the idea. A little more than a year later, in March 1954, the NSC and JCS signed the documents declaring that atomic weapons would be used at the outset of a general war. Two months before then, in order to close off further debate and to make the new policy public, Eisenhower told John Foster Dulles to deliver a speech on the subject to the august Council on Foreign Relations.

Titled The Strategy of Massive Retaliation, the speech portrayed an enemy—the Sino-Soviet bloc—bent on exploiting weaknesses in every crevice of the Free World. If we played the enemy’s game, Dulles said, we would wind up sending troops to shore up defenses everywhere, thinning our forces, straining our alliances, and going bankrupt in the process. Instead, he announced, the United States would now pursue

maximum protection at a bearable cost—meaning it would depend primarily upon a great capacity to retaliate, instantly, by means and at places of our own choosing. In other words, it would retaliate, at the start of a war, with nuclear weapons.

Through the next few years, battles continued to rage within the Pentagon over the degree to which the nation should rely on nuclear weapons for its defense. On one side, Army generals and Navy admirals argued that the military should at least try to push back a Soviet or Chinese invasion with conventional forces in the first rounds of battle—a strategy that would mean, among other things, larger budgets for their services. The JCS policy paper of March 1954 reflected this balanced approach to some degree, stating:

It is the policy of the United States that atomic weapons will be integrated with other weapons in the arsenal of the United States. In other words, atomic weapons would be used at the outset, but in tandem with conventional weapons, as part of a campaign that integrated nuclear and nonnuclear forces.

On the other side of this interservice rivalry, Air Force generals pushed for the pure Mitchell-Douhet vision: relying entirely on nuclear weapons and winning the war by annihilating Russia. At one closed Senate hearing, General LeMay derided any other form of armed strength, and any other strategy, as obsolete. An aide to Lyndon B. Johnson, the Senate’s top Democrat, wrote in a memo after the hearing that LeMay

is not just calling for more bombers and more H bombs. He is calling for nothing but heavy bombers and H bombs.

Late in 1955, the JCS chairman, Admiral Radford who just a few years earlier had been a ringleader in the revolt against the growing dominance of the A-bomb, switched sides and joined the Air Force in its unabashed advocacy. The Army chief of staff, General Matthew Ridgway, remained a dissident. A decorated officer in World War II and commander of the Eighth Army in Korea,

Ridgway resigned in protest. His successor, General Maxwell Taylor, another commander in those wars, roused his staff to mount one more round of resistance.

In a draft of the following year’s JCS war plan, known as the Joint Strategic Capabilities Plan, Taylor tried to insert language suggesting that the military might refrain from using nuclear weapons in wars that were smaller and more geographically confined than general war. When Radford found out about Taylor’s maneuver, he fired off a memo to all the Chiefs, calling the proposal

a radical departure from the present approved policy, which clearly states that atomic weapons will be used not only in general war but in local war—including small, distant wars that didn’t necessarily involve vital interests—if the situation dictates.

Radford met with Eisenhower on May 14 to complain about Taylor’s recalcitrance. Eisenhower said that, on one level, he agreed with Taylor: a really small war, one involving a few Army or Marine battalions, might be fought with only conventional weapons. But beyond that, especially if the fighting grew to the magnitude of the Korean War, we would have to bring in nuclear bombs.

The admiral had no problem with that distinction, but he added that if we ever got involved in, say, Vietnam, we wouldn’t send large numbers of soldiers, as the French had done with disastrous results. Instead, Radford said, we’d drop nuclear bombs there too. Eisenhower didn’t disagree.

Ten days later, in a final appeal, Taylor asked for a meeting in the Oval Office with Eisenhower and Radford to make his case against this all-but-total reliance on the Air Force and nuclear weapons. Eisenhower calmly reminded his old Army friend that it was official U.S. policy to base all military planning on the use of nuclear weapons, without restriction, at the outset of any war with the Soviet Union. True, some NSC staffers had advocated using conventional weapons and escalating step by step if possible. But, Eisenhower said, he personally thought that atomic bombs would be dropped at once and in full force; he saw no basis for thinking otherwise; it was

fatuous to believe the United States and the Soviet Union would be locked in a life and death strugglewithout using atomic weapons.

Eisenhower did not concede, as he had in his earlier one-on-one meeting with Radford, that he might refrain from going nuclear in a very small war. Instead, he now told Taylor that, even in those kinds of wars, commanders should plan on using tactical atomic weapons—short-range missiles and munitions—against strictly military targets.

Taylor argued that even the use of small nuclear weapons would trigger escalation to general war. Eisenhower waved away the concern, saying that they were no more likely to do so than setting off twenty-ton blockbusters.

Then came a remark that Eisenhower intended as reassurance, but that left Taylor puzzled and angry. Don’t worry, the retired Army five-star general told the current Army chief of staff, you won’t be rendered obsolete: if nuclear war comes, the Army will be vital for maintaining law and order on the home front.

Still, for all his calm confidence, Eisenhower was conflicted about the nuclear era. By this time, the Soviets had built their own atomic arsenal and a fleet of aircraft with the range to drop bombs on American soil. On July 1, seven weeks after his meeting with Radford and Taylor, the president and his senior national security advisers heard a Top Secret briefing on the consequences of a nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union. The briefing was delivered by a retired Air Force general named Harold Lee George, the staff director of the Net Evaluation Subcommittee, a secret unit—its very existence was highly classified—inside the National Security Council. The unit’s task was to take data and intelligence about Soviet and American nuclear arsenals, encode the data in a computer program that simulated mutual attacks, and calculate the results.

The results were grim, for both sides. An attack by the United States destroyed the USSR as a society. But an attack by the Soviet Union hardly left America unscathed: the federal government would be wiped out; the economy would undergo near-total collapse, with no recovery of any sort for at least six months; two thirds of the population would require medical care, and most of them would have no way to obtain it.

Eisenhower was visibly shaken by the briefing. That night, he wrote in his diary,

The only possible way of reducing these losses would be for us to take the initiative and to launch a surprise attack against the Soviets. But that option, he continued, was impossible. It would go against our traditions, and, in any case, Congress wouldn’t allow it.

The only way to keep the nation secure, he concluded, was to maintain a powerful deterrent—and that meant a mighty nuclear arsenal. If deterrence failed, if the Soviets doubted our resolve and mounted an attack, Eisenhower was stumped on how to respond. For that, he relied on General LeMay.

LeMay wasn’t the first leader of the Strategic Air Command. When SAC was formed in 1946, a year before the Air Force became independent, General George Kenney was put in charge.

Kenney had run the air campaign in the Southwest Pacific toward the end of World War II, but he had never been involved in strategic bombing, nor was he a remarkable organizer.

When LeMay succeeded him in 1948, he found a command in shambles.

LeMay ordered a drill: every B-36 bomber, from every SAC base across the country, would launch a full-scale mock attack on Dayton, Ohio. The results were devastating: not a single pilot finished the mission, not a single navigator found his assigned target, not a single gunner managed to simulate the procedures of dropping a bomb.

Over the next three years, through relentless drilling, unforgiving discipline, and shrewd lobbying for more money from Washington (for more planes, personnel, and bombs), LeMay whipped SAC into shape, transforming it, in the words of his admirers, from a hollow shell to a cocked pistol. His intensely loyal subordinates gave him a variety of doting nicknames: Old Iron Pants,The Big Cigar,The Demon, and Bombs Away LeMay.

When LeMay had been a colonel, placed in charge of an air division in Europe in the early years of World War II, he heard reports that many pilots were aborting their missions in the face of heavy fire from German fighter planes or antiair batteries. Upon taking command, he told his airmen that he would ride in the lead plane on every bombing run, and if any plane behind him veered away from battle, its entire crew would be court-martialed. The abort rate plummeted overnight.

Now at SAC, as commander of the most powerful armada of planes in the history of the world, LeMay’s mystique only deepened. The culture of SAC was the cult of LeMay.

On paper, LeMay answered to higher powers, specifically to the Air Force chief of staff, General Hoyt Vandenberg, who subscribed to a more traditional concept of warfare. While LeMay was firebombing cities in Japan, Vandenberg was commander of the Ninth Air Force, providing close air support to Army soldiers fighting in France. So, when he and his aides in the Pentagon devised plans for a nuclear war, they focused on tactical objectives—defeating the Soviet Union’s armed forces, not just obliterating it as a country.

Vandenberg described his plan as

killing a nation, but he parsed the campaign into three categories of targets, which he labeled

Delta-Bravo-Romeo. Delta stood for the disruption of the vital elements of the Soviet war-making capacity. Bravo called for the blunting of Soviet capabilities to deliver an atomic offensive against the United States and its allies. Romeo stood for the retarding of Soviet advances into Europe. In this scheme, destroying all three sets of targets would destroy the Soviet Union as a war-making power.

LeMay thought this was abstract nonsense. The quickest way to destroy the Soviet war machine was to destroy the Soviet Union—especially its large cities, where the political leaders and military commanders and factory workers lived. This concept had worked for LeMay in Japan; and now that A-bombs and H-bombs were in the arsenal, the idea of going after small, discrete targets—a ball-bearing plant here, an electrical plant there—struck him as the height of inefficiency. It was also impractical. Nobody quite knew where a lot of these targets were; SAC’s pilots would have to go searching for them while flying over enemy territory. This was the opposite of planning, and LeMay was a stickler for rigid plans. (

Besides, LeMay had already written his own orders. Labeled SAC Emergency War Plan 1-49, it called for slamming the Soviet Union with

the entire stockpile of atomic bombs in a single massive attack, dropping 133 A-bombs on seventy cities within thirty days.

SAC headquarters was located at Offutt Air Force Base, just outside Omaha, Nebraska, more than a thousand miles west of Washington, D.C., and the Pentagon. This remoteness from the center of political power would have put many commanders at a disadvantage, but LeMay turned isolation into a strength. It allowed him to ignore orders when they contradicted his ideas about modern warfare. So he ignored Vandenberg’s nuclear war plan and continued to work on his own.

In preparation for LeMay’s plan, his staff drew up a list of roughly 100 targets to hit, mainly the largest Soviet cities. As SAC’s budget swelled, and as the labs churned out more bombs, LeMay’s intelligence officers came up with more targets. The work took on a self-serving circular logic: more weapons drove the need to find more targets; more targets propelled a need to buy more weapons.

From 1949, the year of SAC’s first war plan, to the spring of 1955, the list of targets grew fourteen-fold—and continued to grow each year through the end of the decade.

Over the same time span, the Navy also expanded its arsenal of nuclear weapons, most of them strapped under the wings of combat planes, which, in a war, would take off from supersized aircraft carriers as they steamed near Soviet and Chinese shorelines. Some of these planes would hit the same targets as SAC bombers. To LeMay, this was a nuisance, but not much more than that.

In the mid-1950s, though, the Navy launched a new project, a new kind of weapon, which posed—and was explicitly designed as—a threat to SAC’s survival.

Since the collapse of their revolt at the start of the decade, the Navy’s admirals had never stopped resenting the Air Force for usurping the defense budget—nor had they stopped looking for a path to regain their own dominance.

In 1956, Admiral Arleigh Burke, the newly named chief of naval operations, thought he found it. Burke, the commander of a carrier task force in the Second World War, had been a keen supporter of a controversial program in the late 1940s to build a nuclear-powered submarine. Now, as the Navy’s top admiral, he jump-started funding for a similar, more modern sub capable of carrying sixteen long-range ballistic missiles, each tipped with a half-megaton nuclear warhead. The missile would be called the Polaris.

Around this time, several defense analysts, in the Pentagon and in outside consulting firms, were warning that, as the Soviets built more nuclear weapons, the Air Force’s bombers, sitting on airfields—and its intercontinental ballistic missiles, which were scheduled for production in the next few years—would be vulnerable to an attack.

The Polaris subs didn’t have that problem. They could roam beneath the ocean’s surface, undetectable and therefore invulnerable. The Polaris missiles were proving in tests to be inaccurate, but that didn’t matter much: a half-megaton blast would flatten buildings across a radius of five miles, meaning each missile would demolish a large city, even if it veered a bit off course.

In short, the Polaris could do what SAC’s bombers would do—and without the bombers’ vulnerability, which practically invited the Soviets to launch a preemptive attack. The implication was clear: the Navy could soon supplant the Air Force as the main proprietor of the bomb.

Just a year before the Polaris project got under way, the Navy formed a team of technical specialists called the Naval Warfare Analysis Group. And the analysts of NAVWAG, as the group’s name was abbreviated, devised a strategic doctrine—a new way of looking at nuclear weapons and nuclear war—that provided a rationale for the Polaris and a critique of SAC’s weapons and war plan.

NAVWAG’s main thesis was that, once the Soviets had their own nuclear arsenal, the notion of winning a nuclear war was absurd and any plan to launch an American first strike was suicidal. Therefore, the only sensible purpose of nuclear weapons was to deter an enemy attack. The only way to deter an enemy attack was to develop a nuclear arsenal that could answer an enemy attack with a devastating counterblow to the enemy’s cities. The best way to do that was to maintain an invulnerable second-strike force. And the most invulnerable force imaginable was a fleet of missile-carrying submarines moving undetected beneath the ocean’s surface.

Under this doctrine, it didn’t matter if the Soviets kept building more and more nuclear weapons. As long as the United States had enough weapons to destroy the Soviets’ cities—Burke thought that the missiles in forty submarines, or 640 missiles in all, would be sufficient—and as long as those weapons couldn’t be attacked, there was no need for the United States to respond in an eternal, strength-sapping numbers contest.

By contrast, the only way to compensate for the vulnerability of SAC’s bombers’ missiles was to build more bombers and missiles—and to keep building more as the Soviets built more. This approach, the NAVWAG study noted, was a prescription for an arms race and an invitation to the enemy for preventive-war adventurism.

In the summer of 1957, at the annual conference where the service commanders came to the Pentagon and briefed the Joint Chiefs of Staff on their individual slices of the nuclear war plan, one of the NAVWAG analysts outlined this new view of how many weapons were really needed. LeMay was in the room, as commander of SAC, and as he listened to the briefing, his tongue started shoving his cigar from one side of his mouth to the other and back again. It was well known that LeMay’s emotional state could be gauged by the intensity of his cigar’s lateral movements. By the end of the NAVWAG briefing, he’d nearly chewed it down to a stub.

The Air Force chief of staff, General Thomas White, was also worried. Eisenhower had military aides from each service working for him in the White House. The Air Force aide had been writing memos, warning White that his Navy counterpart was making serious

inroads in selling Polaris to the president.

Burke and his fellow admirals were waging war on the Air Force, and the NAVWAG report—which Burke circulated to all active and retired Navy officers—was the lance of the charge. White and LeMay knew they had to come up with their own doctrine—a strategic concept that only the Air Force could execute—and to spread the word at least as widely.

The first step, White felt, was for the Air Force to come clean on a crucial piece of its strategy for nuclear warfare. The NAVWAG report, and Burke’s whole concept for the Polaris, rested on the premise that a second-strike deterrent was enough to keep the nation secure. The Air Force had contributed to this notion, White wrote in a memo to all of its commanders,

through the over-use of the term ‘retaliation.’ It was time to emphasize, up front, that in a confrontation with today’s enemy, the nation needed to take the initiative. The ability to respond to a Soviet nuclear attack was necessary but insufficient. We also needed the ability to preempt that attack before it happened—to destroy the Soviet missiles and bombers before they were launched, before they inflicted catastrophic damage on American soil.

At the same time, White knew that he needed something more than take the initiative to sink the Polaris. A preemptive strike might take out a large part of the Soviets’ nuclear arsenal, but probably not all of it; if the Soviets retaliated with the weapons that survived, they could still kill millions of Americans.

The Air Force had its own think tank, the RAND Corporation. Unlike NAVWAG, which was a unit of the Navy, RAND was nominally independent, but it received most of its funding from the Air